Free Press Under Fire
Sitting up late blogging and watching C-SPAN, I managed to catch the speech by Bill Moyers taking on the media and the government at the conference put on by a non-profit group called Free Press, "working to involve the public in media policymaking and to craft policies for more democratic media," according to its mission statement.
I may as well publish my own book on the press now, since the Newsweek debacle will make it even harder to do or sell any meaningful investigative journalism for some time to come.
Meanwhile, the MSM thinks it can stop the bleeding circulation numbers and the plummeting public trust in public opinion polls by covering more church. What a joke.
At least there's one newsman on TV willing to take on a sycophant like Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman who let gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon in the press room and who is now blaming Newsweek for deaths in the Middle East and diminishing America's reputation in the world. I think someone needs to look in the damn mirror.
Keith Olbermann is calling on McClellan to resign. It won't happen, of course, but at least someone has the guts to say it out loud in front of a camera.
Is the American press as we know it doomed - along with 229 years of experimentation with Democracy?
Let us all now bow down and give praise to famous men, right? Shouldn't we all just be grateful for the crumbs they throw us?
I already know one real reporter who recently had to take a job as a grocery store checkout clerk just to feed her family. We'll all be working for Wal-Mart soon - if a lot of people don't by dog stand up and protest the direction we are headed.
It's just a damn good thing the Republican Party decided a long time ago that presidential terms should be limited to two in the wake of FDR's four terms during The Depression and World War II. Otherwise, the organized religious forces in this country might just anoint George W. Bush king for life and we could kiss this great experiment in Democracy good bye.
The good news is, there will be more elections in 2006 and 2008. There is some chance that the libertarian independents might just split from the religious conservatives and help the pendulum to swing back and allow a few more Democrats back into power.
Otherwise, dear friends, Hunter S. Thompson may prove right to lament the death of the American Dream. It sure seems to be slipping away these days. It's hard to even muster a decent "ho, ho."
Comments
Newsweek has a lot more collective ingegrity than the scumbags
who insist that they retract the story. Someone flushed the Koran? And Newsweek reported it?
Newsweek should have said: 'We'll retract the story if you, Mr. McClellan, tell us what it was that slamed into the pentagon on 9/11." It sure wasn't a 757.
Newsweek finally did retract. "A good first step," says the White House. Yes-- a good first step for good little Nazis.
Now I find that Bill Moyers, who helped START Public Television, was eased out of CPB because some big right wing organization thought that the truths he told were TOO truthful.
It is recommended that one hear Moyers' comments on this. The Big Chill. We need Moyers. We don't need some right-wing, newly-appointed Bushian flack skewing Public Televison towards the right (or towards any ideology).
Posted by: Rowland Scherman | May 17, 2005 05:10 PM